While putting this site together, my son and I engaged in an argument about the ideal width of web pages.
Based upon the standard advice I give my web design students I argued for a 760 pixel width which, even with scroll bars, can easily be accommodated on an 800 by 600 pixel monitor.
He, on the other hand, argued for a wider design – somewhere in the neighborhood of 960 pixels. The advantages were obvious: we’d have additional design flexibility and be able to move to a three-column design. He also argued that people with small monitors just weren’t worth worrying about (he can be a bit judgmental).
The argument was brief and I won (it’s my site after all). Based upon other websites I monitor, I was expecting 5 to 10 percent of my audience to be using the smaller monitors and I wasn’t willing to alienate them. The result was the narrower, two-column design you’re looking at now.
The numbers are in
Now that we’ve been around for a month and had a few thousand visitors, I decided to check my Google Analytics stats and see if I’d made the right decision. It turns out the answer is an emphatic NO! Of our first 3,845 visitors only 26 (0.67 percent) had monitors narrower than 1024 pixels.
Where I went wrong
In retrospect, it appears I violated one of my own cardinal rules: consider your audience. I based my decision on numbers generated by websites targeted to a general audience. I didn’t consider that an audience of graphic design and web professionals would naturally tend to have larger (in many cases much larger) monitors.
Looking ahead
One month isn’t a scientific sample and, as time goes by, I expect we will reach a wider audience and see the number of visitors using small monitors rise a bit. Still, the numbers are impressive enough that I’m already starting to look at a redesign. After all, if I can offer a better experience to 99 percent of our audience, perhaps the 0.67 percent of designers who won’t spring for a new monitor once a decade really aren’t worth worrying about.
So, son, if you’re reading, here it is: I was wrong and you were right.
July 5th, 2007 at 11:12 pm
Woohoo!
July 6th, 2007 at 12:21 am
One month data is not that small. Also if you know the audience then easily you can conclude this. The 0.67 says almost all your visitors are living in 2007 and not in 1990s… If my target audience is technically sound people, and I can offer them better usability with a 3 column template, I would have ignored the 600*800.
July 6th, 2007 at 2:49 am
You shouldn’t encourage your son that way. I know the guy and that is just asking for trouble!
One of my site tracking tools recently added resolution statistics. I was thinking the same way you were but it turns out less than 2% of my total all-time traffic uses 800×600. And most of that is from a year ago. Now it is less than 1%. I checked my other sites and only one showed some consistent traffic using 800×600. So I think that it is time to retire “good old 760″ unless you are working on a site that is non-current events, non-tech, non-design and caters to an international audience where portions of it may be using what we consider “outdated” technology.
July 7th, 2007 at 10:35 pm
I’m still at the 760 pixel phase (actually, 780), fearing that I would shut out too many people if I would go wider than that. Fact is however, you don’t really shut out anyone with a too small design, but you would shut up people with a too wide design…. So it’s not like it’s “bad design”, no?
July 8th, 2007 at 11:25 pm
I wish I had those kinds of numbers. At my site, Analytics today showed that 12.21% of my visitors use 800×600 and 12.55% over the past month use 800×600. So, I’ll alienate a good chunk if I’m too wide. GRRRR.